5 Mistakes Local Businesses Make with Instagram Marketing

Instagram hasn’t been around as long as Facebook or Google, but it has gained tremendous popularity in recent years. A growing number of local businesses are investing in it. There are over 500 million monthly users on Instagram, which gives every brand many opportunities to engage with their target customers.

Unfortunately, many local businesses don’t understand how to reach their customers effectively. Here are some common mistakes they make.

Being Too Specific with Location Targeting

You obviously want to target customers in the location the business operates. However, it is easy to overlook other neighboring communities.

Let’s say that you are running an Instagram marketing campaign for a restaurant in Rohnert Park, California. You obviously want to try engaging with customers in Rohnert Park. However, it is important to remember that customers from other cities will be open to traveling to Rohnert Park to visit your business. You should also include cities within a 20-mile radius, such as Santa Rosa, Petaluma and Sebastopol.

It might be a good idea to test each of these cities in a separate campaign. You may notice that visitors from cities engage with your ads better than others.

Not Establishing a Conversion Goal

What do you intend to accomplish with your Instagram ads? Do you intend to get people to sign up for your email list? Do you want to generate more Instagram followers for branding? Do you want to get customers to submit a quote request?

You won’t be able to run a successful Instagram campaign without establishing your conversion goals ahead of time. You need to decide how your sales funnel will work before making this decision.

Neglecting to Test Images in Your Ads

There are multiple components in your Instagram ads:

Headlines

Ad copy

Images

Images are arguably the most important elements, but they are often overlooked by many advertisers. You want to focus on testing them first. After you found an image with the best CTR and conversion rate, you can start testing other elements. However, you may need to test 20-100 images before deciding which image works best.

Overlooking the Benefits of Branding Campaigns

Too many businesses focus exclusively on performance marketing. The truth is that branding campaigns can actually work much better, especially for local companies.

Building a strong brand takes time. Instagram can be a great place to do so.

Failing to Track Your Budget Carefully with Paid Instagram Campaigns

You can generate a little bit of traction with free traffic on Instagram, but you can generally do much better with paid traffic. You can get a steadier amount of Instagram views, which leads to more revenue. You can also test campaigns much more quickly.

The obvious downside with paid traffic is the risk that you will lose your investment. You can mitigate this risk by carefully tracking your budget. You don’t want to spend too much money on any given ad or variable that you are testing. If you aren’t getting results after spending $20 or $30, then you will want to go back to the drawing board and see where you went wrong.

You will probably lose some money at first, but you will at least have an idea what works best. You just need to spend your money carefully.